We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.
HANNAH ARENDTFor abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
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Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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Hitlerism exercised its strong international and inter-European appeal during the thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in public opinion everywhere.
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Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor considerably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel of the world of use objects.
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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.
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A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers
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If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.
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The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.
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If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
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Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
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The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
HANNAH ARENDT